Traffic Jam

Mom and Dad might not grumble about sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic if they shared the view from the back seat: from that vantage point, the highway appears to be teeming with animals--monkeys, giraffes, pigs and more--who weave between and even drive the cars and trucks. The road next becomes an intergalactic expressway, at least in the mind's eye--for in reality the cars have scarcely budged. Stoltz's crayon-bright illustrations hum with zany, almost surreal, energy, but after a time one begins to seem much like the next. This sameness, along with a forced quality to the rhyming text, keeps the journey from soaring as fully as it might. Still, the book contains enough eccentricity to stimulate the imagination and suggest that new worlds may lie beneath (or above) even the most humdrum surface of one's daily life. Ages 2-up. (May)